


WINGED OBSESSIVE

by fatal



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pining, Post-Timeskip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25202533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal/pseuds/fatal
Summary: Sachirou would call it a crush, or desire, but Kourai insists there’s something too ordinary about words like that. Nothing about Hinata Shouyou is ordinary. Everything about him, and everything which swims between the white shores of his feet and Kourai’s own, stands up proud. Sings monumental.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Hoshiumi Kourai
Comments: 65
Kudos: 445





	WINGED OBSESSIVE

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daedalust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daedalust/gifts).



> cw smoking 
> 
> hahaha yes. my adlers shotgunning smoke trilogy is complete.
> 
> [HOSHIUMI PLAYLIST! ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Zlrzx8BaPFwPcMiSV0spk?si=guMh-4ZcTFmM7Y54FiKqQw)

_I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit_  
_feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among_  
_men and women; I spoke only to angels._

_— Louise Glück, excerpt of Ancient Text_

In the dark following the match, Kourai approaches Hinata Shouyou and declares, voice full and unwavering, “I’ve been waiting for you, Hinata Shouyou. This whole time, I’ve waited for you.”

Hinata Shouyou turns around and looks at him with the sweetest, warmest smile.

“I know, Hoshiumi-san!”

Kourai waits a bit to see if he adds, _I know, Hoshiumi-san, because I’ve been waiting for you too. This whole time._

He doesn’t.

But Hinata Shouyou does say, face bright and open, “Hoshiumi-san, want me to show you around Miyagi tomorrow?”

As if Kourai could ever respond to Hinata Shouyou with anything other than _yes._ In the late October chill, the word floats up between them like a foil balloon in summer.

✺

Kourai’s mother calls Kourai a winged obsessive and he asks her _what even is that_. She says it’s from some foreign poem and _you get very obsessive, Kourai-kun. Over your dad’s old manga. Over peeling lychee with your teeth more quickly than your cousins. Over the snow monkeys with red faces at Jigokudani Park. Over volleyball._

_Um. That sounds bad?_

_No, I mean it in a good way. Mostly. That’s where the ‘winged’ part comes in. Your wings could take you anywhere, Kourai-kun._

Kourai’s face splits into a boyish grin. He nods his head and keeps chewing on raspberries plucked fresh from his mother’s garden.

Later, kid-Kourai springs up, up, up from the neat-trimmed yard behind his house. He jumps like he’s trying to find a grip on the sky. His hand pulls back and hits ten spikes in a row. Twenty spikes. Thirty spikes. More and more. Never enough.

✺

The day after the match, just as promised, Hinata Shouyou takes Kourai to Karasuno high school. _There’s no point in showing you Miyagi without taking you to its heart,_ Hinata reasons, proud and earnest.

There’s a team practicing in the gym when they enter, Mikasa balls curving reckless over the nets. Then Hinata Shouyou steps inside and everyone’s around them, eyes wide and bright like they’re vying for views of a saint.

There, Kourai witnesses firsthand the way a small gymnasium fills with light enough for a garden when Hinata Shouyou enters it. And the way Hinata Shouyou brightens, in turn, with light enough to fill a hundred more.

✺

At family functions everyone looks up in delight at Kourai’s older brother and cousins, who each grow another metre every year. _Oh, you’ve got a girlfriend? Oh, you’re in the basketball team? You’re so, so, tall now, how lucky of you!_

Well. What about him? What about the bird inside of a boy named Hoshiumi Korai, all 173.1 centimetres of wing muscle and bone?

Kourai has so much that they don’t have. He’s got more resolve to one-up the invisible god that is gravity. He’s got monopoly over air. At least half of his features, from his eyelashes to his grin to the volume of his laugh, is taken from his mother. At least fifty percent of him is beautiful by default.

Then he went and spent his whole life filling up that other fifty percent with flight in the absence of height. Ropeless suspension. Clean, clean vertical.

Kourai makes it to Spring Nationals in his second year of high school. He doesn’t expect to find someone who’s done just the same.

✺

At the centre of Nishi Park, Sendai, everything above and below Kourai's body glows crimson with autumn. Hinata Shouyou laughs in the face of a world on fire and runs into its seamless red.

Hinata Shouyou’s elbows never keep flat to his sides. They rise and fall and propel him over the earth. Tanned wrists cut through the air in rapid, blurry motions, miraculously attuned to the moving of a mouth.

There is speaking. There is “Hey, Hoshiumi-san, look over there!” alongside the graceless flailing of an arm in a beech tree’s direction. There is speaking, then there are speaking hands.

When Hinata’s fingers brush, faint, along the back of Kourai’s knuckles, this too is whispered dialogue. So are the hands which comb through Kourai’s hair, careful like a rake through snow.

“Wow, this haircut really suits you, Hoshiumi-san!” says the mouth. Touchtouchtouch says the wandering hand.

✺

“Kageyama, you know the feeling you get when you play volleyball? Have you ever felt something like that, but like, for another person?”

“What?” Kageyama whips his head to look at Kourai, eyes wide. His fingers twitch against the volleyball he’s holding. “No. Of course not. Why would you ask me that.”

“So defensive, Kageyama! I'm not accusing you of murder. I’m really not, by the way.”

Kageyama stares hard at Kourai. An icy, icy blue. “Is there someone you feel that way for, Hoshiumi-san?”

“Maybe,” Kourai says, sighing a little. “I don’t know if they feel the same, I guess.”

“You’re lucky, then.”

Kourai narrows his eyes. Kageyama Tobio is the luckiest person he knows.

“You’re lucky,” Kageyama repeats, eyes never losing their intensity, “that you don’t know. That’s better than knowing for sure that they don’t. That they never would.”

Kourai blinks. Taps a finger to his chin. “Wow. What an optimistic way to spin it!”

Kageyama smiles. At least, Kourai thinks he does. Just the smallest twitch of the lips. He turns away from Kourai and walks off without another word.

✺

Kourai-kun picks up and puts down and picks up his phone again before finally dialling to say, “Hinata Shouyou. Will you come see me in Nagano?”

It’s off-season and months after Hinata’s shown him around Miyagi. They’ve both got enough time for Kourai to try and even the score. Two winged obsessives trading sights of their nests.

Hinata Shouyou tells him _yes._ Another foil balloon. Another full burst of crinkled light and helium.

✺

The first time Kourai speaks to Hinata Shouyou, his gut curls with a feeling he still doesn’t have a word for. It’s like he’s flown by accident into something bright and hot and nameless. It’s like he’s laid his eyes on the future.

But he’s learned by then not to greet new people with grand statements like that so instead Kourai stares him down and asks, “what position do you play?”

“Middle blocker!” says Hinata Shouyou, fifteen years old and doling out more life than what should fit inside his body. Inside any kind of body.

Later, a boy with fiery hair leaves a trail of sweat behind him on his way out of the gymnasium. Kourai could hear the thick of his breathing from the other side of the court.

“I’ll be waiting for you, Hinata Shouyou!” Kourai calls after him, eyes alight like candles. A new, reckless prayer. A new, seven-year obsession that’s got nothing to do with manga or lychees or red-faced monkeys, but maybe everything to do with volleyball.

✺

Hinata Shouyou says, “take me to a place you’ve always loved.” And so Kourai takes him to a place full of birds.

He takes him to Karuizawa Sanctuary, with its sun-dappled green and its wide-eyed squirrels. Its rare butterflies and hidden black bears. Glass-eyed serows. Eighty bright-winged types of bird. Shouyou bounds ahead of Kourai on a dirt path bordered by larch trees, grinning, arms outstretched horizontal.

Eighty-one bright-winged types of birds.

Some dead composer from France studied the song of twenty-six kinds of birds here, Kourai tells Hinata. Kourai doesn’t remember the composer’s name but he remembers some of the birds. Bush warblers, Siberian blue robins, Japanese tits, narcissus flycatchers. Each carried a different kind of jewel in its beak. _The composer wove birdsong into his music_ , his mother said as Kourai stared up at a chestnut tree, small, brown things hopping amongst its branches. _That’s how he composed The Birds of Karuizawa. Sixth movement of Sept Haikai_.

Hinata Shouyou listens with wide, wide eyes. He gasps and nods and tilts his head at all the right moments. He collects and clings onto Kourai’s stories like they’re made out of some rare smoke, like they’ll slip through his hands if he’s not careful enough. When Hinata Shouyou speaks, his eyes fill with light. When Hinata Shouyou listens, his eyes fill with honey.

“You’re so cool, Hoshiumi-san!” Hinata’s nodding and vibrating in a way that makes him seem so much bigger than he is. “You know so much about the birds here! I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the birds in Miyagi.”

Kourai grins, watching the honey in Hinata’s eyes turn to light again. Maybe Hinata Shouyou doesn’t know so much about birds, but there’s no need. After all, he knows so much about flight. Flight on the court, arm reeling for a quick. Hummingbird-fast.

And then the wings he puts in Kourai’s chest. Bordered by feathers and passerine-sure. Red-flanked Bluetail. Olive-backed Pipit. Mallard, Eurasian Teal, Bewick’s swan.

✺

Seven years after their first meeting, Kourai sees Hinata Shouyou spring up above the net again and full-body burns from his hairline to his feet. All these years but the feeling’s still the same.

He thinks, maybe there’s a word for this. Sachirou would call it a crush, or desire, but Kourai insists there’s something too ordinary about words like that. Nothing about Hinata Shouyou is ordinary. Everything about him, and everything which swims between the white shores of his feet and Kourai’s own, stands up proud. Sings monumental.

If Kourai was not Kourai but rather Goku from Dragon Ball Z he’d call it Super Saiyan. In memory he sits on the carpet next to his mother’s feet, child eyes fixed to a freckled screen. A man with hair like a pineapple screams and sends yellow fire spewing from his skin. Kourai’s small body tries to mirror him, jumping up to stand on two little feet. Little back haunched. Little balled fists. He opens his mouth to scream like Goku until his mother finally scoops him up from the carpet and swings him around and says, _Kourai, you can’t go Super Saiyan because you’re not a Saiyan, I’m sorry. It’s not my rule. It’s a rule of the universe._

That’s how volleyball makes him feel. That’s how Hinata Shouyou makes him feel, when he sees him again, maybe. Like he’s gone Super Saiyan.

✺

Hinata Shouyou laughs and twirls around Kourai’s kitchen, flour in his hair, on his clothes, on his nose. Everything Hinata Shouyou touches turns into early summer. Even mid-winter. Even the snow swirling down the window’s awful dark. The yellow bowl of dough Hinata clutches one-armed to his chest is summer. The silver whisk Hinata stirs rapid with his other hand is summer.

Kourai floats around in a long floral apron. Turns a dial to preheat the oven. Orange light blooms from the oven’s glass mouth and spills like water onto everything. Light sings itself sweet from Hinata Shouyou’s mouth and spills like water onto everything.

Kourai steps away from the oven and wipes the flour off Hinata’s nose with a thumb. Moves his thumb down to clean the side of his cheek.

Hinata Shouyou’s skin is soft like everything else about him. He goes motionless at Kourai’s touch. Eyes wide. Lips parted. He’s still holding the bowl and whisk when Kourai leans in. There is no breath between them. Only light, only light.

✺

Hinata Shouyou’s mouth touches Kourai’s mouth and Kourai turns into summer. Just like the bowl. Just like the whisk. Oh, another thing made beautiful after Hinata Shouyou’s touched it.

They’re the only two awake for miles. They laugh their awakeness into each other’s mouths.

✺

Kourai’s standing in line at a donut shop in Shijnjuku when he asks, a little hesitant, “Ushijima-san, you know the feeling you get when you play volleyball? Have you ever felt something like that, but like, for another person?”

Ushijima doesn’t respond for a moment, but he stares long at a small sign propped up on the counter. _New mango glazed donut!_ the sign says. He hasn’t looked at anything else for the last five minutes.

“No.” Ushijima finally turns his head to face him. “It would be reckless to conflate volleyball with another person, Hoshiumi.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“A distraction like that is unwelcome. You start to see them in everything. It is an intolerable feeling.”

“Ushijima-san, you seem to know an awful lot about this.”

Ushijima says nothing.

Kourai walks out of the shop clutching a paper-bagged vanilla dip close to his chest. Ushijima follows after him, both hands empty.

✺

Kissing Hinata is different from kissing Sachirou back in high school. Being with him is different. Clearer, even though Kourai loved Sachirou. Loved the tower of him. Sachirou and his beautiful, tall walls made of earth and heavy stone. Heavy stone and no window. No foothold for miles.

Hinata Shouyou is an open field. When Kourai wanders in, there’s no gate, no wire fence, no strand of breeze to stop him. Just the gentle bend of grass below his stepping feet. Just sun and breath from laughter curling warm against his nape.

One time, their kiss is accompanied by smoke. They’re still waiting for their friends to emerge from the restaurant. Hinata Shouyou tells funny jokes and funny stories and his laughter draws brief clouds in the dark. Kourai’s stomach spins soft and warm with _shabu-shabu_ and sake and Hinata Shouyou.

Kourai watches Hinata dangle a cigarette from his mouth and hold a baby blue lighter to the tip. Hinata notices him looking and smiles around the filter. He plucks out the cig between two fingers and blows smoke into the night.

“Hinata Shouyou. You’re not a smoker, are you?”

Hinata laughs. “Of course I’m not, usually. But Kageyama’s, um,” he pauses a moment, “friend, is. I think he’s trying to quit, actually, but he’s got this secret pack in his coat. I’m doing him a favour, really!”

“By smoking through his secret pack?”

“Exactly, Hoshiumi-san.” Hinata grins, and his tongue flicks out for only a second. Kourai’s eyes follow the motion. “Hey, come here.”

“Come there?”

“Yes, come here. If you want. Only if you want.”

Kourai takes a step forward. Then another, and another. Hinata Shouyou brings a gentle hand to Kourai’s cheek before leaning in, smoke sliding from a parted mouth.

Smoke or no smoke, it is always a sudden swelling of heart, of lungs. It is always like trying to chew the skin off of fire.

✺

So much exists between Kourai and Hinata Shouyou. There’s Fukushima prefecture, Gunma prefecture. 500 kilometres of space, 6 hours of travel. An ivory net stretched atop a linoleum floor. Even their bodies. Bone and skin wrapped over them like bird cages.

Still, they warp the air to accommodate them anyway. Let them fly anyway. The whole world watches them leap impossible heights and grin at each other above the ivory net. Watches them whittle down the distance between Miyagi and Nagano until it is nothing, until touch is fact enough to be an afterthought for both of them.

So much exists between them, and still Kourai falls in love with Hinata Shouyou and the lighthouse of him. Hinata Shouyou, traffic sign of the sea. Fixed green glow to the right of the harbour.

**Author's Note:**

> hoshihina shotgunning syndrome instead of brain there is hoshihina shotgunning


End file.
